When Bernie Sanders famously said: “Enough of those damned emails,” many thought they’d heard the death-knell of that wearisome argument. Just this week, President Obama referred to it as “all that noise,” designed to confuse new voters about Hillary’s trustworthiness. The concept of “noise” comes from cybernetics and it refers to anything that interferes with a message sent by one party to another–we laymen also know it as static. Sad to say, we are all familiar with static on our cell phones which keep us from hearing the other person’s words and messages. The static in this case, as we all know by now, are the dark references to some of Hillary’s emails. Of the emails, President Obama also noted that while Clinton, while serving as his Secretary of State, made an “honest mistake” by using a private email server, as it was now “being blown up into just some crazy thing,” which will affect new voters when they hear “all that noise.” Why now, you may ask, all of this focused static. Well,...

The growing wealth and income gap between the top 1 percent and the other 99 percent has reached staggering dimensions. And now, more than ever, the “have-nots” are made up largely by the middle class, which now includes many “workers.” Years ago I dismissed Marx’s class conflict theory as yet another, albeit more radical, utopian socialist dream. Then in my first, of a long line of classes, taken and then taught, about communism, in both theory and practice, I continued to be intrigued by Lenin’s 1917 tract: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Now, nearly 100 years after Lenin wrote his theory of imperialism, and the first time since The Great Depression, Lenin’s check-list for revolution appears close to being realized. Ironically that is largely due to the policies of the “haves” themselves. Whether this has come about mostly by greed or by ignorance is unclear. What is clear, however, is that policy differences between Tump and Clinton will go a long way towards deciding how peaceful a revolution...

Seventy years of bi-partisanship have gone into creating a credible deterrence strategy to cope with the challenges posed to our foreign policy in an era of nuclear powers and the means of delivering them. Our deterrence strategy rests upon the elimination and reduction of doubt as to whether certain actions against ourselves and our allies will produce a response by the U.S. that is unacceptable to a potential enemy. The weaving of alliances and other measures taken to implement and maintain this strategy has been supported by every President, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, both Republican and Democratic, since the fateful dropping of those early atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II and ushered in the dangerous nuclear age. This credibility of our response and commitments to our allies have been seriously, if not fatally, weakened by Donald Trump’s clearly ignorant insertion of doubt into the equation. He might as well have invited North Korea across the “no-man’s land” and across the 38th parallel and on into our...

The Quinnipiac national poll, released Tuesday, December 22, showed Trump with 28 percent, just a 4 percent lead over Ted Cruz–his closest rival (and the leader two recent Iowa Polls). The significance of the Quinnipiac poll is that it was taken over the period of December 16th to 20th; hence it was the first national poll administered, at least in significant part, following Trump’s praising of Putin’s authoritarian regime. Just as it appeared that Trump’s campaign was finally showing signs of imploding, a second poll was released, this one by CNN. The two polls showed unusual variance, not only in terms of absolute numbers, but in direction of change–at least for Trump. The CNN poll was taken the 17th to 21st. It showed Trump at 39 percent, a full 21 percentage point lead over Cruz. Some variance among polls is to be expected early in the primary season. But not like this. Obviously pollsters are having a difficult time modeling the likely voter. To understand what I mean about “modeling the likely voter,”...

More than twenty Americans didn’t view the Republican debate for every one that did–making one wonder whether it made any difference as to who “won.” There are three levels of “winning” a presidential debate: 1) What actually happened? What would a theoretical panel of debate experts say about the various debate performances. This seems to be the least important kind of “winning,” 2) Whom do the media proclaim as the winners and losers? With all of the entrenched interests of the various media outlets, and the use of “talking heads” and “spin doctors,” the second type of “winners” may bear little relationship to those proclaimed by the first. Thus, media crowning, in reality, is relevant only insofar as it plays a part in determining who the “winners” are in the third level, which is whether it produces, 3) actual changes in the polls that may be attributable to 1) or 2). It’s too early to determine 3), actual poll changes due to the debate. As for the media, # 2) above,...